Political Geography 29 (2010) 247–255
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’
in the ‘war on terror’
Jennifer Hyndman*
Centre for Refugee Studies, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto ON M3J 1P3, Canada
a b s t r a c t
Keywords:
Critical geopolitics
Post-foundational ethic
Feminist geopolitics
Violence
Child soldier
After two decades of scholarship on ‘critical geopolitics’, the question of whether it is largely a discursive
critique of prevailing knowledge production and geopolitical texts or critique with an implicit, normative
politics of its own remains open. These positions are not incommensurate, and much scholarship on
critical geopolitics does both. This paper analyzes critical geopoliticians’ concern with this question in the
present historical moment and probes the possibility of a post-foundational ethic as the basis for ‘the
political’ in critical geopolitics and beyond. Empirically, this paper explores these theoretical tensions
within ‘critical geopolitics’ by tracing the disparate fates of two young men, both child soldiers at the
time of their capture. ‘Child soldier’ is an unstable category subject to geopolitical valence and stigma
during the ‘war on terror’. The deployment of extra-legal tactics and spaces of violence, such as those
faced by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, point to the rise of biopolitics combined with geopolitics,
illustrating the intersection of sovereignty and governmentality as important political fodder for critical
geopolitics two decades after its inception. The stories of Canadian Omar Khadr, one of the youngest
prisoners at Guantanamo and the only citizen of a Western state still held there, and Ismael Beah,
a rehabilitated soldier who fought as a boy from Sierra Leone, illustrate too how geographical imagination strongly shapes access to provisions of international law and the victimized status of ‘child soldier’
in particular.
! 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Does critical geopolitics adopt explicitly normative positions to
remain critical and politically relevant to the violence of war? Or
are its followers more likely to rekindle efforts to destabilize
dominant modes of producing geopolitical knowledge and unravel
the policies and popular cultures that propagate conflict? Evidence
abounds that critical geopolitics does both (Ò Tuathail cited in Jones
& Sage, in press), but that the purely poststructuralist project of
deconstructing the texts of elite political actors and popular players
is theoretically incompatible with political positions that oppose
violence. As scholars of the ‘critical geopolitics’ project mark twenty
years of writing (see Geopolitics special issue, 2008), questions of
how critical geopoliticians position and see themselves persist.
Simon Dalby asserts that the ‘critical’ in critical geopolitics
usually refers to the problematization of discourse rather than
a worked out alternative political project (Dalby, 1994; Dalby, 1996).
Megoran (2008, p. 473) argues more forcefully that ‘‘critical
* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 416 736 2100x33689.
E-mail address: [email protected]
0962-6298/$ – see front matter ! 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2009.10.010
geopolitics can be criticised for providing a weak normative
engagement with the social institutions and practices of warfare.’’
He asks, under what circumstance, if at all, should a state be
considered ‘right’ in making war? In so doing, he exposes a longstanding tension within critical geopolitics between a pure critique
of hegemonic geopolitical discourse and the politics of engagement
in which scholars tacitly or directly take positions for or against
military manoeuvres, social movements, and the use of violence
more generally. While Megoran personally opts for ‘‘a Christian
praxis of nonviolence’’ (2008, p. 494) and makes the case for taking
a normative stance within given geopolitical scripts, this paper
explores further the possibility of non-foundational notions of ‘the
political’, drawing on the work of Judith Butler (2009, 2004), Geraldine Pratt (2004), and feminist geopolitics (Dowler & Sharp,
2001; Hyndman, 2004, 2001) that wrestles with the conundrum of
not wanting to resuscitate a liberal humanism and with it fixed
notions of ‘justice’, but also wanting to make political commitments
in specific struggles. Both, I contend, are possible.
The second part of the paper employs critical geopolitics in
relation to the construct of the ‘child soldier’, empirically examining the failure of states and of international legal provisions to
protect some child soldiers but not others. The very constitution of
248
J. Hyndman / Political Geography 29 (2010) 247–255
child soldier as a subject is fraught and contingent upon certain
geographical imaginations of ‘innocence’. It draws upon
geographical scholarship to relay the ways in which biopolitics and
‘indefinite detention’ (Butler, 2004) have forcefully emerged as
tactics of violence since the inception of the ‘war on terror’. The
shift of geopolitics to extra-legal spaces such as Guantanamo Bay
illustrates the emergence and intersection of sovereignty and
governmentality where prisoners’ bodies become ‘‘pure vessels of
violence’’ (Butler, 2004, p. 18) and ‘‘war, at the microlevel of the
imprisoned body, means torture’’ (Hannah, 2006, p. 634). Tracing
the disparate fates of two young men, both armed children fighting
in wars at the time of their capture, I trace the geopolitical instability of the category ‘child soldier’. The story of Canadian citizen,
Omar Khadr who remains at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay at the
time of writing, illustrates how geopolitical location and imagination strongly shape access to provisions of international law and the
victimized status of ‘child soldier’ in particular. In contrast, the
heroic story of Ishmael Beah, rehabilitated child soldier who was
‘saved’ from war and is now an author, demonstrates how geopolitical imagination shapes the application of law, protection, and
rights.
The tactics of extra-legal violence and spaces of incarceration
are a reminder that critical geopolitical analysis remains relevant.
Its effectiveness in reducing violence without contextually-derived
political positions to push back against the biopolitics of dispossession, however, remains questionable (Butler, 2004). ‘‘Such
dispossession. creates diverse spaces of exception: spaces where
people can be controlled, coerced, tortured or even killed with
impunity because their geographical location is imagined and
administered as somehow beyond the reach of justice’’ (Sparke,
2007, p. 339, emphasis added). As Dittmer and Dodds (2008, p. 449)
also ask, ‘‘[h]ow do geopolitical imaginations differ as a result of
these [local, historicized] positionings?’’ Where does this leave the
field of critical geopolitics after twenty years of scholarship?
Two decades of critical geopolitics: to oppose, resist or
deconstruct?
Critical Geopolitics is no more than a general gathering place
for various critiques of the multiple geopolitical discourses and
practices that characterize modernity.. It is merely a starting
point for a different form of geopolitics, one hopefully
burdened less by nationalism and chauvinistic universals and
more committed to cosmopolitan justice and self-critical
analysis – Gearoid Ò Tuathail in Jones & Sage, in press.
The re-militarisation of global politics clearly suggests the
continued relevance of Ò Tuathail’s specification of the need for
critical geopolitics to grapple with the culture that produces
imperial attempts at domination in distant places – Simon
Dalby, 2008, p. 413.
Critical geopolitics, as I read it, is not simply about exposing the
power-knowledge relationships at the heart of geopolitical
reason, and denaturalising the global order by portraying it as
socially and historically constructed through an ‘‘examination of
the geographical assumptions, designation, and understanding
that enter into the making of world politics’’ and how places and
people are stitched together to narrate and explain events. It is
all of these, but it is more: a political project committed, as
Dalby puts it, to challenging the specifications of politics and
dangers used to justify violence – Nick Megoran, 2008, p. 493.
The quotations above hint at the range of divergent positions
scholars of critical geopolitics take in the present historical
moment. They draw on the work of Jeff Popke (1994), John
Agnew (2003), Gearoid Ò Tuathail (aka Gerard Toal) (1996a),
Klaus Dodds and James Sidaway (1994), and Simon Dalby (2003).
Megoran is at once frustrated by and concerned about the dearth
of commentary in critical geopolitics on prospects for resistance
(Sparke, 2000), its expression as disembodied critique (Sharp,
2000), and its absence of political engagement beyond such
critique (Hyndman, 2004). In short, critical geopolitics can be
faulted either for having weak normative engagement with the
social institution and practices of warfare (Megoran, 2008) or,
being a series of tactical engagements, for becoming too
embroiled in the messy projects of geopolitical strategizing that
require ontological commitments and norms to ‘do’ politics. And
yet, as Ingram and Dodds (2009, p. 3; emphasis added) contend,
analyses of ‘‘geographical imaginations are essential to any
critique of the war on terror and emerging landscapes of security,
and to the construction of alternatives.’’ Critique and political
change are not incommensurate.
Megoran (2008) shows that much of what passes as critical
geopolitics in academia is imbued with clear normative assumptions
and political strategy. He traces the scholarship of Ò Tuathail/Toal on
Iraq and Bosnia to ascertain when and how he make normative
judgements about war. Megoran demonstrates how Ò Tuathail is
very much against the US invasion and occupation of Iraq which
killed swaths of civilians without legitimate grounds, both in the
early 1990s and the 2000s. In contrast, the brutality of a one-sided
war in Bosnia-Hercegovina leads Ò Tuathail (2004, p. 500) to argue
that ‘‘Bosnia needed selfless intervention in the name of universal
human rights.’’ The point of this analysis is to underscore the tacit
political positions scholars of critical geopolitics take, even if critique
of dominant geopolitical knowledge production is their central aim.
In a similar manner, Ò Tuathail’s political engagement in the
Bosnian context (1996b) is taken up by Hyndman (2004) who
analyzes his take on the work of Irish journalist, Maggie O’Kane,
whose visceral dispatches from the frontlines of the war in Bosnia
represent an implicit engagement in the politics she reports.
I propose the notion of an ‘anti-geopolitical eye’ not as a distinct
alternative way of seeing Bosnia that transcends the geopolitical.[but] an eye that. persistently transgresses, unravels
and exceeds the frameworks of scripting Bosnia in Western
geopolitical discourse (Ò Tuathail, 1996b, p. 173).
In Ò Tuathail’s words, O’Kane’s reports are ‘direct’, ‘personal’,
‘moral’, and ‘angry’. Her reports are politically engaged in relation to
her audience with whom she ‘‘establishes a moral proximity’’
(Ò Tuathail, 1996b, p. 175). Her dispatches are not simply seen as
displacing a dominant gaze, but of engaging politics at strategic
moments whereby O’Kane becomes part of the script that she creates.
Hyndman describes this engagement as a kind of feminist geopolitics
at work: embodied, situated, and politicized with a given context.
Ò Tuathail (1996b) published both his key exegesis, Critical
Geopolitics, and the more feminist article on O’Kane’s reporting in
Gender, Place and Culture in the same year. Megoran’s take on the
Gender, Place and Culture chronicles the ways in which Ò Tuathail
implicitly adopts a political position. The book, in contrast, provides
compelling critiques of Geopolitics within a largely historical
enframing. By remaining separate from any alternate epistemological ways of knowing how to ‘geo-graph’ the world or from
ontological commitments to it, however, critical geopolitics
remains disembodied critical critique, eschewing the political
(Sharp, 2000; Sparke, 2000). However, Ò Tuathail is not a theorist
alone; his own works tack carefully between theoreticallyinformed critique and empirically grounded research on the
representation and conduct of war, a sensibility that is captured in
his 1996 book:
J. Hyndman / Political Geography 29 (2010) 247–255
[c]ritical geopolitics is one of many cultures of resistance to
Geography as imperial truth, state-capitalized knowledge, and
military weapon. It is a small part of a much larger rainbow
struggle to decolonize our inherited geographical imagination
so that other geo-graphings and other worlds might be possible
(Ò Tuathail, 1996a, p. 256).
The ‘larger rainbow struggle’ has indeed expanded critical
geopolitics in all directions. Projects of social and political change as
well as decolonization abound under its rubric. As Megoran notes,
one simply has to look for normative expressions of ‘the political’ to
find them (see Dalby, 2003; Dodds, 2005; Dowler & Sharp, 2001 to
name but a few).
Engaging politically requires adopting a value-laden, normative
position that depends upon pre-given notions of the subject or the
‘just war’. While Megoran (2008, p. 480) contends that ‘‘it [just war
theory] does not demand a single foundational metaphysic for its
ethic’’ because it is a set of practices and traditions, those practices
and traditions are set within a historical and geopolitical context
imbued with cultural assumptions and norms. In committing to
counter topographies or resistance to hegemonic geopolitical
imaginations, one risks recreating the grand narratives of oppositional, if not dominant, geopolitical discourse. Herein lies the rub:
these are the very narratives that critical geopolitics loves to
deconstruct.
Critical geopolitics began less as a theory of how space and
politics intersect than a taking apart of normalized categories and
narratives of geopolitics. It situates power not in the hands of
a sovereign state or individual, but in more relational ways that
traverse a spectrum of scales of social life (Sparke, 1998). And yet
since that inception, critical geopolitics has either tacitly or directly
taken political positions, and invoked normative judgements in
a range of geographical contexts.
How, then, can dominant scripts of geopolitics be both displaced
and re-situated in order to foreground the security of people on the
ground, those subjects effaced by realist geopolitics and international relations? Many scholars of critical geopolitics noted above,
and of feminist geopolitics (Dalby, 1994; Dowler & Sharp, 2001;
Hyndman, 2001; Kofman, 1996; Smith, 2001), have succeeded in
taking apart the taken for granted containers into which geopolitics
are poured (Weber, 1994), but also in staking positions in actually
existing conflicts, violence, and geopolitical imaginations that
inhabit our worlds.
Matthew Sparke (1996, 2005) bridged this gap in his analysis of
the ways in which a Canadian feminist organization " the National
Action Committee (NAC) " contests the public/private divide of
social space in the face of trade liberalization and economic
restructuring. Highlighting the group’s interventions into constitutional and public debates by underscoring women’s experience
and the material effects of such economic proposals, Sparke
documents how masculinist and state-sponsored ‘big picture’
politics are displaced by the counter-public of the NAC. Sparke’s
analysis of the material, political, and social dimensions of
gendered geopolitics go beyond a purely discursive exegesis. His
approach does not simply suspend modernist assumptions about
political action, but critically engages the ways in which it is waged.
Such scholarship falls under the rubric of critical geopolitics, and
yet it aims to ‘flesh out’ a ‘‘solely representational and identarian
understanding of academic critical geopolitics’’ (Sparke, 1996, p.
615, 2005, p. 124). This critical geopolitical analysis, combined with
a pro-feminist commitment to embodied vision, provides one
response to the shortcomings of critical geopolitics.
In a similar vein, more than a decade ago Paul Routledge (1996)
examined social movements in South Asia to examine the ways in
which they challenge state-centred notions of geopolitical
249
hegemony. Telling stories about places as distinct locations,
comprising distinct knowledges, histories and theatres of oppositional politics, he grounded an often disembodied critical practice
as critical engagement. Despite or perhaps because of its political
investments, Routledge retains the possibility of resistance and
action by arguing that such change is scripted in more ways than
one. His tales of subversion, conflict, and change permit the players
he describes to ‘do something’ about their situation, without
subscribing to a single authoritative narrative.
Ò Tuathail’s early argument that ‘culture’ be the focal point of
a new geopolitics is important to this discussion:
a culture of geopolitics is a much sounder ontological position
because it does not reify ‘the economic’ or ‘the political’ but
postulates a dialectical (interconnected) relationship between
the two within the historical context of particular signifying
practices (cited in Dalby, 2008, p. 417).
Dittmer and Dodds (2008) add to this position, stating that
audiences who consume ‘culture’, specifically popular expressions
of it, actively make geopolitical meaning. They draw on Judith Butler
(1990) to theorize culture as performative, as a series of societal
scripts that at once reproduce cultural norms but remain open to
change as people challenge and change these scripts, themselves
morphed through their daily consumption and encounters (see also
Megoran, 2009). Dittmer and Dodds also engage Matt Hills’ (2002, p.
123) work on fan cultures in which meaning is made or conveyed
through acts of media consumption. Drawing again on Butler, Hills’
idea of ‘non-volitional volition’ approaches the concept of the
subject floated in the next section, namely whether critical
geopolitics might reconcile its relation to ‘the political’ through
a post-foundational ethic. Post-foundational, in this context, means
simply that the normative content of an encounter is not pre-given;
such an ethic eschews the essentialism (not to mention ethnocentrism and exclusion) of a single geopolitical narrative. The next
section suggests that critical geopolitics can deconstruct dominant
modes of knowledge production, and resist or oppose constellations
of power that are not pre-given or assumed.
Toward a post-foundational ethic of encounter
I doubt very much that non-violence can be a principle, if
by ‘‘principle’’ we mean a strong rule that can be applied
with the same confidence and in the same way to any and all
situations. – Judith Butler, 2009, p. 165.
From 2000 onwards, feminist political geographers have made
the case for a feminist geopolitics (Dowler & Sharp, 2001; Gilmartin
& Kofman, 2004; Hyndman, 2001, 2004; Pain & Smith, 2008; Sharp,
2000) as a critical intervention into dominant geopolitical
discourses of fear, statecraft, war, and violence more generally.
These arguments are varied and by no means represent a singular
body of work. Rather like the ‘meeting place’ for critique that Ò
Tuathail (cited in Jones and Sage, forthcoming) describes in relation
to critical geopolitics, feminist geopolitics is starting point for
alternative epistemologies, more embodied subjectivities, and
a post-foundational ethic of geopolitical encounter. Feminist
geopolitics and critical geopolitics are allies in the battle to unsettle
dominant scales of analysis and framings of geopolitics. Some have
argued that feminist approaches are more reconstructive in their
geographical imaginations. While they employ poststructuralist
critiques that could just as easily be called critical geopolitics,
feminist geopolitical analyses go further to generate more
embodied ways of seeing and doing politics on the ground
(Hyndman, 2004; Sharp, 2000).
250
J. Hyndman / Political Geography 29 (2010) 247–255
Dittmer and Dodds’ (2008) decision to draw on Judith Butler’s
1990 notions of ‘regulative ideals’ to analyze audiences of pop
culture is a vital, and arguably, feminist one. As noted, they contend
that fan agency is conditioned by regulative ideals [norms] that are
part of consumed culture, illustrating how to some extent popular
culture is both produced and produces audiences. They do not,
however, examine the fascinating transformation of Butler’s intellectual and political positioning up to 2004, when her earlier
attachment to performativity, and ‘‘non-volitional volition’’, ceases
to rule out political protests of violence as a central part of her
analysis. In Precarious Life, Butler is angry, even outraged, by the
atrocities committed by humans on other humans. The invention of
‘enemy combatants’ and indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay
appears to have deeply affected her positioning as a scholar and
political person. In Precarious Life (2004, p. 93), Butler argues that
the exercise of sovereign power is bound up with the extra-legal
status of these official acts of speech: ‘‘sovereignty trumps established law.’’ The state can manufacture law, in the form of new
military tribunals for example, even if such law is considered illegitimate by other governments or international bodies.
Avoiding the discourse of east and west, or of ‘civilization’,
Judith Butler asks (2004, p. 20), ‘‘Who counts as human? Whose
lives count as lives? And finally, what makes a grievable life?’’ All of
these questions would have been slippery ones for the Butler of
1990 who asserted that human subjects are no more or less than
the enactment of the regulative scripts that reproduce dominant
social norms. In the newer work, each of us, she argues, is constituted as a political subject by virtue of the social vulnerability of our
bodies. Butler could be charged with creating a new form of
universal subject, or even a form of humanism, a point she
acknowledges
By insisting on a ‘common’ corporeal vulnerability, I may seem
to be positing a new basis for humanism. That might be true, but
I am prone to consider this differently. A vulnerability must be
perceived and recognized in order to come into play in an
ethical encounter, and there is no guarantee this will happen
(Butler, 2004, p. 42–43).
In short, Butler is arguing for a common humanity catalyzed by
an ethical encounter, a context catalyzed by risk to the social body.
The content of that encounter is not yet specified, leaving open any
fixed notions of ‘just war’ or legitimate uses of violence.
Butler is careful not to attribute the violence and exceptionalism
of places like Guantanamo to a discourse of dehumanization that
produces these effects. Rather, it is a ‘‘limit to discourse that
establishes the limits of human intelligibility’’ (Butler, 2004, p. 35).
It is not simply a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an
established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of
ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real?
Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? . Does
violence take place on the condition of the unreality? (Butler,
2004, p. 33)
Geographers have picked up on Butler’s conception of ‘human’
as subject to vulnerability. All people may be rendered vulnerable
to violence though scored differentially across asymmetrical power
relations. Derek Gregory (2007, p. 230) puts it this way, ‘‘Our
vulnerability is differentially distributed – scored by class, gender,
sexuality, ‘race’ and other markers – but it is also shared.’’ Megoran
(2009) notes that Butler shows how a hierarchy of grief can
structure the ability to mourn and people’s subsequent inclusion or
exclusion from the category of human. A parallel notion of shared
status is elaborated by Iris Marion Young (2000) in her analysis of
‘seriality’, a process by which a shared fate grows out of specific
historical configurations of place. A bunch of people standing at
a bus stop, she proffers, does not identify as a group until the bus
fails to arrive and people begin talking to each other for information
or to make alternative arrangements. In such contexts, the group, or
subject, is not pre-figured, but is produced in various social
encounters.
Put another way by writers commenting on the devastation of
2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean region:
Struggles over interethnic justice, neo-liberalism, economic
distribution, the disempowerment of women, caste bigotry and
such have shaped the [Sri] Lankan political landscape in significant ways over the last decades. even the tsunami cannot
wipe out the imprint of these fault lines (Nesiah, Nanthikesan, &
Kadirgamar, 2005).
Here, the layers of political history embedded in the landscape
of an already poor and wartown country score the differential
impact of yet another layer of destruction: the tsunami. All of these
examples, from Butler and Gregory to Young, Nesiah, Nanthikesan,
and Kadirgamar, point to the possibility of commonality forged in
situ and scored differentially across social and spatial locations.
Feminist geographers have yielded rich insights into engaging
‘the political’ without essentializing ‘the project’ (Sharp, 2007).
Linda McDowell (1995) argued that ‘transformation’ is almost
always more difficult than transgressive deconstruction of dominant binary oppositions. Without a transformative feminist politics,
McDowell implies, critical geopoliticians and other post-structuralists are left with well-interrogated categories, but no clear way
forward in practice.
In the opening quotation of this section, Ò Tuathail sets less
chauvinistic universalisms and cosmopolitan justice as the ambitious aims of critical geopolitics. Yes, how such universalisms could
be forged and what cosmopolitan justice might look like remain illdefined. Feminist geographer, Gerry Pratt, draws on Butler’s analyses, positing a site of ‘the political’ where poststructuralist
perspectives meet material feminisms. Outlining Ernesto Laclau’s
call for a universalism built upon the ‘empty signifier’, Pratt aims to
flesh out his disembodied philosophical position. Reciting Butler’s
slogan ‘‘Put your body on the line,’’ Pratt (2004, p. 86) recognizes
how difficult it is to speak outside of normative discourse. She
argues for the necessity of standing on the line between the
speakable and unspeakable ‘‘in order to make use of power and
discourse in ways that ‘do not renaturalise the political vernacular
of the state and its status as the primary instrument of legitimating
effects (Butler, 1990, p. 178)’’’ (Pratt, 2004, p. 86).
To anchor this free-floating, post-foundational universalism,
both Butler and Pratt using the materiality of the body, not fully
produced by or absorbed into discourse, to forge a space for
a feminist, non-essentialist notion of ‘political’. ‘‘Concrete struggles
become linked, not because their objectives are the same, but
because they are equivalent in their confrontation of repressive
power’’ (Pratt, 2004, p. 84). A form of critical geopolitics emerges
for protesting the violence of war through shared vulnerability. ‘‘To
be able to speak and be heard as a social movement already implies
being constituted within the field of the political’’ (2004, p. 86).
So, how might the category of ‘child soldier’ bring together
conceptions of critical geopolitics as, on the one hand, the taking
apart of dominant geopolitical narratives, and on the other, the
staking of political positions within specified geopolitical struggles? In The Spaces of Security and Insecurity, edited by Ingram and
Dodds (2009), the spatial vocabulary of political geography and
international relations is interrogated as a step towards changing
geographical imaginations and framings of war (Agnew, 2003).
Terms like ‘homeland’, ‘international community’, ‘failed/rogue
state’, and ‘terrorist network’ are often rendered as already-given
and unproblematic. The same can be said of the category ‘child
J. Hyndman / Political Geography 29 (2010) 247–255
soldier’, one imbued with a particular ‘‘crusade’’ character by child
rights advocates (Macmillan, 2009) and UNICEF protection officers.
‘‘Child soldiers have become an amplified version of Anglophone
childhood and its inherent deviance.. The coupling of child
soldiers almost exclusively to an African geography lends the
discourse a racial element’’; ‘‘the child soldier discourse has
become a new modality where colonial themes can be played out’’
(Macmillan, 2009, p. 37, 45). Concepts that are supposed to protect
‘innocents’ or be foundational to global order, such as international
law in the case of child soldiers, can be manipulated or ignored in
the context of geopolitical conflict (Elden, 2009).
From legal to extra: tracing the ‘child soldier’ in law and
practice
It is crucial to ask under what conditions some human lives
cease to become eligible for basic, if not universal, human rights
(Butler, 2004, p. 57)
Like Butler, Derek Gregory (2007) shows how the Bush administration is not simply waging a ‘‘war on law’’ but through law (law
as a tactic). The Bush administration showed manifest disdain for
domestic and international laws, but it neither dismissed nor
disregarded them. This matters because it means that ‘‘law is a site
of political struggle not only in its suspension but also in its
formulation, interpretation, and application’’ (Gregory, 2007, p. 207;
italics in original). Violence too is waged by authorities in spaces of
exception despite law, as we know all too well. Violence is a central
tenet of state doctrine and law: ‘‘law and violence are not opposed
but hold each other in a deadly embrace’’ (Gregory, 2007, p. 211).
Drawing on Agamben, Gregory notes that the sovereign is the point
of indistinction between violence and law.
Detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay were construed as
a legally constituted space of exception: ‘‘Indefinite detention’’ is an
illegitimate exercise of power, but it is part of a broader tactic to
neutralize the rule of law in the name of security. ‘Indefinite
detention’ does not signify an exceptional circumstance, but, rather,
the means by which the exception becomes established as a naturalized norm’’ (Butler, 2004, p. 57). As before, sovereignty
trumps established law; sovereignty embraces exceptionalism
(Reid-Henry, 2007). Rogue governments, like the US, can make or
interpret law, in the form of military commissions and definitions
of torture, even if such law is considered illegitimate and even
‘illegal’ by other governments or international bodies. ‘‘[T]he
postwar prison becomes the continuing site of war’’ (Butler, 2004,
p. 79), a point underscored by Gregory (2004, p. 321) in his analysis
of Abu Ghraib:
It was the very gravity of the situation outside Abu Ghraib that
was used to license the horrors inside Abu Ghraib: not because
the prison was ‘out of place’, removed from the surveillant eyes
of a high command preoccupied with the armed resistance
beyond its perimeter, but because the US military deliberately
folded the prison into its counterinsurgency operations (emphasis
in original).
The violence perpetrated by prisoners, Butler points out, is
‘‘somehow constitutive, groundless and infinite’’ (cited in Hannah,
2006, p. 633). Matthew Hannah (2006) also explores the treatment,
and specifically, the torture of ‘terrorists’ such as those held at
Guantanamo Bay. To boil down a highly nuanced argument, Hannah contends that if the threat ‘terrorists’ pose is high, then torture
becomes justified as a modality to extract life-saving information
for the greater public good. Hannah’s (2006, p. 636) analysis of the
‘ticking time bomb’ thesis shows how all means of interrogation are
allowable ‘‘in order to gain access to the bodies holding life-saving
251
information’’ from prisoners in the ‘war on terror’. Guantanamo
detainee, Omar Khadr, is one such prisoner.
Two boy soldiers, or one? Khadr and Beah
Before delving into the individual biographies of Omar Khadr
and fellow former child soldier Ismael Beah, it worth spending
a moment comparing their stories and belonging to the category
‘child soldier’. The juxtaposition of Khadr and Beah may seem
somewhat random, a comparison that serves my argument but
describes two vastly different stories. And yet both men are Muslim
by faith and boy soldiers at the time of their capture. Beah fought
for a government paramilitary in Sierre Leone before he was taken
from battle and rehabilitated with help from UNICEF. His book, A
Long Way Gone, was published in 2007 to critical acclaim; Beah
(2007) has toured US campuses, made speeches at Amnesty
International meetings and addressed other international groups
and governmental bodies. Khadr, by contrast, is a Canadian-born
citizen and was a child of fifteen when was captured and charged
with killing a US soldier with a grenade in a gunfight in
Afghanistan. He is now twenty-three and awaits his fate as one of
the remaining ‘enemy combatant’ detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Beah was born into an educated family in a small, rural village in
Sierra Leone whereas Khadr was born into family in Toronto,
Canada. The stories of the two boy soldiers, now young men, could
not be more distinct, yet by juxtaposing them, one might ask
whether geopolitical and neocolonial framings of ‘the boy soldier’
mean that Khadr, born in Toronto’s ‘global North’ and with living
parents at the time of his fighting– should have ‘known better’ than
Beah, the boy who lost his parents and then seemingly himself to
civil war in Sierra Leone. I contend that these framings are critical to
understanding the disparate outcomes from similar stories of child
soldiering.
How, then, is the category ‘child solider’ defined in international
law, and how is it tempered by geopolitical imagination? Who gets
to belong to that category and access the protections it affords? The
United Nations Convention of Rights of Child (CRC) was adopted in
1989 and entered into force in 1990. In Article 38, it specifies 15 as
the minimum age for recruitment into a State’s armed forces and
calls on the States to, ‘‘take all feasible measures to ensure that
persons who have not attained the age of fifteen years do not take
a direct part in hostilities’’. Those children who are over the age of
fifteen, however, but still remain under the age of eighteen are still
voluntarily able to take part in combat as soldiers. To fill this gap,
the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child
on the involvement of children in armed conflict came into force in
2002. It stipulates that State Parties ‘‘shall take all feasible measures
to ensure that persons below the age of 18 do not take a direct part
in hostilities and that they are not compulsorily recruited into their
armed forces’’. The Optional Protocol further obligates states to
‘‘take all feasible measures to prevent such recruitment and use,
including the adoption of legal measures necessary to prohibit and
criminalize such practices.’’ Likewise under the Optional Protocol
states are required to demobilize children within their jurisdiction
who have been recruited or used in hostilities, and to provide
assistance for their physical and psychological recovery and social
reintegration (UNHCHR, 2009).
The Paris Principles, signed by 60 states in February 2007, create
a practical basis to address the problem of children’s recruitment as
soldiers (Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, 2009), and
contend that child soldiers who commit crimes are victims, not
criminals, among other pledges to protect children caught in such
situations. The Paris principles ‘‘reflect experience and knowledge
from across the globe and are intended to both foster greater
programmatic coherence and support and promote good practice’’
252
J. Hyndman / Political Geography 29 (2010) 247–255
(article 1.9). They are complementary to the legal framework of the
CRC and the Optional Protocol.
And yet, the very different tactics and treatments employed by
authorities who manage these youth attest to and take apart the
distinct geopolitical imaginations of what it means to be a ‘child
soldier’ and the spaces in which they dwell. Lorraine Macmillan
(2009, p. 37) argues that child soldiers belong to what the Anglophone world considers to be a personal, private sphere, in which
they are perceived as vulnerable and under threat. ‘‘By discursively
situating child soldiers in this sphere rather than the public-political one, child soldiers logically become prey to systems of social
regulation such as those over the poor.’’ In the private sphere of
childhood, volition is also more likely to be attributed to environment and adults in positions of authority. As Beah writes in his
book, youth workers in the rehabilitation centres told him that
becoming an killer, an addict, a child soldier was not his fault.
Beah’s biography is brief next to Khadr’s. He has become
a mentor and inspiration to college students across the US as
a reformed child solider-cum-Oberlin College graduate-cumauthor. Beah’s story is chronicled in his book, which was sold at
Starbucks and assigned as required freshman reading at some US
universities. He was twelve when he was first touched by war; his
village of Mogbwemo was attacked and his parents killed in Sierra
Leone. Hungry and alone, he was recruited by a government
paramilitary in which he was only fed at first, but eventually he
fought as a child soldier for the group, killing many people. Beah
was eventually sent to a demobilization camp where he was
repeatedly told that being a fighter, being violent, and killing
people was ‘not his fault’.
Technically, child soldiers cannot be prosecuted for the crimes
they commit. Stephanie Nolen and Erin Baines (2008), however,
analyze a terrible twist on child soldiering and the relation of age to
guilt in their story of Dominic Ongwen. Ongwen became a senior
commander in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the rebel group
led by Joseph Kony since 1987 in Northern Uganda until Kony fled
into hiding recently. The LRA has recruited some 30,000 children
into its ranks over the past two decades. Ongwen was captured by
the LRA when he was ten and became a child soldier. He is now an
adult leader of the rebel group, charged with the rape, torture, and
killing of civilians at the International Criminal Court. Ongwen is
the first person to be charged with the same war crimes that were
committed against him. Legally, children cannot be prosecuted for
what they do as underage soldiers, but there is no provision for
child soldiers who become adults who are responsible for their
crimes.
Beah travelled to the United Nations in New York during the
demobilization phase to address the General Assembly on the
plight of child soldiers. Eventually, he was adopted by Laura Simms,
an American woman whom he met on that trip. He currently lives
in New York City and works for an international NGO that works to
curb the recruitment of child soldiers.
Khadr, in contrast, may have been a child soldier, but he has
more powerfully been tagged ‘enemy combatant’ and ‘terrorist’,
monikers that appear to carry more geopolitical valence than
‘child soldier’. The most glaring evidence that Khadr is considered undeserving of even the basic protections of citizenship is
that the Canadian Government (under two different political
parties, and over many years) has not repatriated Khadr to the
land of his birth and citizenship for trial and/or rehabilitation
there. Unlike all other nationals of OECD countries, including
Australia and Britain, Canada has not sought to bring him home
to face charges, despite having the extraterritorial jurisdiction to
prosecute certain criminal offences, including those related to
terrorism, alleged to have taken place overseas (El Akkad, 2008a).
In January 2009, on his first day in office, US President Barack
Obama pledged to close Guantanamo Bay camps within one
year. Currently a minority Conservative Government, led by
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, holds the seat of Government in
Canada. It has refused to repatriate Khadr and try him in Canada,
even though the Federal Court of Canada ruled in the spring
of 2009 that the Government would have to allow him to
return if the US Government sent him back. The Canadian
Government has appealed this decision to the Supreme Court of
Canada, resulting in a veritable battle – captured by media (see
Fig. 1) – between legislative and judicial systems about the rights
of a citizen accused of terrorism to return home.
Omar Khadr could be the first child to be tried for a crime of war
since the Nuremburg trials and certainly the first child soldier
prosecuted for war crimes in US history (Koring, 2009). He is the
youngest prisoner held in extrajudicial detention by the US at
Guantanamo, one of two men at the facility who were taken in to
US custody as juveniles. So what makes Khadr so different from
someone like Beah, whose crimes, which include killing many
people during his service in the paramilitary, were arguably as
heinous?
In the mid-1990s, Omar’s father, Ahmed Khadr, was arrested
following the bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan; he was
accused of financially aiding conspirators (Tietz, 2006). Then
Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, intervened on the elder
Khadr’s behalf, and he was released. Only later was it revealed that
the senior Khadr had close ties to Osama bin Laden’s family. Critics
observe that the Canadian Government was horrified by its
complicity in the release of the elder Khadr in a post-9/11 context
(Macklin, 2008). It has refused to hear requests for repatriation or
extradition in the younger Khadr’s case.
University of Toronto Law Professor, Audrey Macklin (2008) calls
this reaction the ‘‘Khadr effect.’’ Trained and coached by his father
who had proven ties to Osama bin Laden, Omar Khadr has been
framed not as a child or a victim but as a terrorist, like his father.
Under international law, he may have been a child in technical
terms when the alleged criminal acts took place, but ‘‘terrorism is
a politicized term, just as terrorism is a political crime’’ (Coombs
cited in Hannah, 2006, p. 626).
[O]ne of the problems’ with defending the youth is that he is
a member of the Khadr family rather than ‘‘a Smith or an Arar’’
(Humphreys, 2006).
Maher Arar is the Canadian engineer born in Syria and sent back
there by US authorities for rendition and torture, while in transit in
New York City. He was exonerated by the Canadian government
after a public inquiry showed that the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police (RCMP) had passed along unverified information to US
authorities (Hyndman & Mountz, 2007). Arar received a settlement
of over CAD 10 million from the government. He is Muslim, and like
Khadr, a Canadian citizen. American authorities continue to refuse
him entry to the US.
While children are defined as innocents, and as civilians in
international law, Derek Gregory (2006, p. 634) reminds us that
such protection is provided ‘‘on condition that they are placed
outside the political process.’’ Khadr has not followed the script of
civilian, as incapable of taking part of hostilities. He has strayed
from the private sphere Macmillan (2009) theorizes. His behaviour
and family connections seemingly exceed the category ‘civilian’,
and the Canadian government refuses to see him as such. Matthew
Hannah (2006, p. 628) adds, ‘‘Like discipline, biopower is aimed at
normalization’’ (Hannah, 2006, p. 628). As a child, Khadr did not
acquiesce to norms of childhood nor was he ‘normalized’ within the
context of Canadian society. Indeed his family sent him to live with
another family in Pakistan so that he could be trained to fight,
allegedly with the Taliban.
J. Hyndman / Political Geography 29 (2010) 247–255
253
Fig. 1. Canadian cartoon on government efforts to keep Khadr in US hands. Permission granted from Ingrid Rice.
Khadr is charged with ‘murder’ which is not technicially
possible in circumstances of war under international humanitarian
law (a combatant belonging to a warring party is not a murderer,
which is a criminal charge). If his actions were criminal, legal
scholars argue that he should be subject to the laws of the land in
which these are a crime (Macklin, 2008). Defying binaries, he is also
called a terrorist. As Jackie Orr (2004, p. 477) notes, ‘‘[t]errorism
does not only name and condemn specific acts, it also promotes
a specific kind of psychological relationship.. As a boundary
marker, the terrorist at once unsettles and destabilizes..’’ Not only
a psychological but also a familial link is forged between father and
son; ‘‘the Khadr effect’’ effectively condemns the son for the sins of
the father.
At least three sets of law apply to Khadr (international, US, and
Canadian because he is a citizen), so sovereigns mix and match in
their modes of managing Khadr, but to date the Canadians have
backed the US process and treatment of him, and only his family,
the Canadian Bar Association, and human rights groups, including
the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Human
Rights Watch, Human Rights First, and the Coalition to Stop the Use
of Child Soldiers, have lobbied for recognition of his child soldier
status in international law (Koring, 2009).
In June 2008, a Canadian House of Commons subcommittee
formally recommended that he brought back to Canada, though the
vote was split along party lines with the government members
voting in opposition to his repatriation. Still, the subcommittee
noted that ‘‘Mr. Khadr should be considered a ‘child involved in
armed conflict’ and should be afforded special protection under
international protocols’’ (El Akkad & Koring, 2008). Not only was
this subcommittee of MPs split, but polls show that the public is
divided about whether Khadr should be returned Canada. While
fully two-thirds of Canadians believe Khadr will not get a fair trial at
Guantanamo, only 43% think that he should be repatriated to
Canada to face charges (Shephard, 2008). Omar Khadr is not framed
as a child, nor as a victim of war as Beah was, in government
statements or in the eyes of the Canadian public. Returning to
Butler (1990) and Hills’ (2002) notion of ‘non-volitional volition’,
Canadian popular opinion may be shaped by Khadr’s refusal to
adhere to the social scripts of ‘child’ or ‘civilian’.
During the same month in 2008, the US Supreme Court ruled 5 to
4 that the US constitution gives detainees a right to challenge their
detention in federal court, which means that federal judges will have
the power to check the government’s claims that the 270 men held
are dangerous terrorists (Glaberson, 2008a; Greenhouse, 2008).
Khadr’s US government-appointed navy lawyer, Lieutenant
Commander William Kuebler, appeared in front of the Canadian
parliament in 2008, requesting that Canada repatriate Khadr for
a fair trial because he would not get one in Guantanamo in a military commission: ‘‘Lies have been told about Omar’’, he testified
(Glaberson, 2008a). Kuebler unearthed a Guantanamo manual that
encouraged interrogators to destroy their notes and thus evidence
pertinent to Khadr’s defense. In February 2008, he also cited
a military report that said another enemy fighter was still alive in
the compound when a fatal grenade killed US soldier, Sergeant
Christopher Speer whom Khadr is accused of killing, back in
Afghanistan in 2002.
Surprisingly, Kuebler also said that ‘‘Bush administration’s war
crimes system ‘is designed to get criminal convictions’ with ‘no real
evidence’’’ and that ‘‘military prosecutors ‘launder evidence
derived from torture’’’ (Glaberson, 2008b). In July, a secret
government report was made public; it indicated that Khadr had
been abused by military interrogators and not allowed to sleep for
more than three hours over a three week period (Austen, 2008).
Evidence of torture during his interrogation emerged. In August
2008, Kuebler launched an effort in the US to have Khadr’s charges
thrown out on grounds that included: the destruction of evidence,
cited in the aforementioned manual; and ‘‘excessive interference’’
by outside agencies in the discovery process, and by the military,
especially the sudden removal of a the military judge who had been
[sympathetically] hearing Khadr’s case to date (El Akkad, 2008a). In
2009, Kuebler was fired by his boss, Pentagon chief defence lawyer
Colonel Peter Masciola (Wingrove, 2009).
254
J. Hyndman / Political Geography 29 (2010) 247–255
On August, 8, 2008, Omar Khadr’s Canadian lawyers filed
a lawsuit with the Federal Court of Canada, demanding that the
Prime Minister intervene and get Khadr released before his military
commission trial was to begin (El Akkad, 2008b).
[Notwithstanding] its affirmative obligation to co-operate in
reintegration efforts, Canada (the first country to ratify the Child
Soldier Protocol and leader in international efforts to protect
children involved in armed conflict) has done nothing except
hide behind vague assurances that Omar is being treated
‘humanely’ – assurances that the Canadian government has
known for years to be absolutely false (cited in El-Akkad, 2008b).
Macklin (2008) further traces how the law produces, manages,
and alienates the alien (in this case Khadr, who is technically a ‘nonimmigrant alien’ in US parlance). Her observation that all detainees
at Guantanamo are not US citizens is perhaps obvious. The terms of
detention there would simply not be legally tenable for American
citizens; Khadr’s treatment and that of the other Guantanamo
detainees is exceptional.
Khadr’s story loosely follows Gregory’s ‘death of the civilian
thesis’ (Gregory, 2006) in which the death of ‘their’ civilians is clear,
but ‘theirs’ are not necessarily equivalent to ‘ours’. Equally, Khadr is
not one ‘us’ in the sense that he is an alien to the US, kept at
Guantanamo under conditions prohibited by the US constitution.
‘Our’ (read: ‘US’) civilians could not be imprisoned there. Returning
to Butler, he is not a ‘real’ civilian, Canadian citizen, or child. His life
does not count as such.
Khadr’s public image has been tweaked recently: from ‘terrorist’
to a ‘‘salvageable’’ and even ‘‘a good kid’’ who risks being radicalized if left imprisoned at Guantanamo (El Akkad, 2008c). This
image was also boosted by the public release of Khadr’s interrogation by Canadian government officials at Guantanamo, revealing
an unsympathetic Canadian government interrogator.
Khadr may yet experience some modest redemption and release
from Guantanamo. The new evidence revealing the presence of
another fighter with Khadr casts considerable doubt on whether it
was Khadr who killed Speer before being shot several times
himself. Khadr’s fate is an open question, but the distinct geopolitical imagination that locates him outside the category of ‘child
soldier’ and inside Guantanamo Bay is not. While Ishmael Beah
works to combat the recruitment of children into war, in between
stops touring his book, Omar Khadr is treated as an exception to the
protection afforded child soldiers.
Conclusion
The fact of extra-legal power is not new, but the mechanism by
which it achieves its goals under present circumstances is
singular (Butler, 2004, p. 92).
The tools of critical geopolitics combined with Butler and Pratt’s
post-foundational feminist ethic unravel the politics of vilification
and exemption from international law in the case of Omar Khadr.
Speaking of Abu Ghraib in a related context, Derek Gregory makes
this observation:
A space that is at once inside and outside the political-juridical
order is a space where these doubled subjects can be conjured
into being, paraded, and subjugated (Gregory, 2004, p. 322).
Khadr has been conjured into being as an ‘enemy combatant’,
not a prisoner of war. These extra-legal appellations serve to show
how new laws become tactics of war, and create exceptionalism in
relation to international protection for child soldiers. In short, the
dominant geopolitical framing of Omar Khadr is that he is not
human:
If we assume that . the violence we commit is violence that
falls within the realm of the recognizable, but the violence that
others commit is unrecognizable as human activity, then we
make use of a limited and limiting cultural frame to understand
what it is to be human (Butler, 2004, p. 89).
Critical geopolitics can avoid a humanist commitment to prefigured subjects and normative positions by using the human
body’s vulnerability to violence as a basis to materialize a nonfoundational ethic of encounter that engages ‘the political’.
Vulnerability to violence is meted out extremely unevenly, in the
case of these two child soldiers. Yet an analysis of their contextually-derived stories of child soldiering to adult hero (Beah) and
villain (Khadr) respectively illustrates that violence can play a role
in the very constitution of the subject. Critical geopolitics can also
galvanize a political commitment to contest violence in all its
forms. ‘‘Geopolitics has a long and bloody history of providing
arguments for war – critical geopolitics should reject the temptation to provide more, and place its capabilities and insights in the
service of this exciting relatively new and under-resourced
project.. It would be deeply ironic if critical geopolitics were to
make the same mistake in the twenty-first’’ (Megoran, 2008, p.
494; Megoran, 2004). Indeed, critical geopolitics is more than
a ‘‘general gathering place for various critiques of the multiple
geopolitical discourses and practices’’ (Ò Tuathail, cited in Jones and
Sage). It is a space for the production of less chauvinistic, and
hopefully nonviolent universalisms that do not come with pregiven content, political values, and prescribed outcomes, but that
attend to context, history, and vulnerability to violence.
If critical geopolitics is ‘‘one of many cultures of resistance to
Geography as imperial truth, state-capitalized knowledge, and
military weapon,’’ (Ò Tuathail, 1996a, p. 256), then it demands
engagement with ‘the political’ without assuming its subject and
struggle. Stopping violence, including torture, rendition, and
refoulement, perpetrated in the names of ‘security’ or ‘terrorism’,
remains a battle for critical geopolitics in Geography and beyond. As
Anna Secor proffers, ‘‘the only way to respond to the violence of the
law, and the law of violence. is with loud bells, bright lights, and
theatrical gestures that boldly reveal the state of exception for what
it is – the everyday dissolution of citizenship, of right, of political
life’’ (2007, p. 51). Critical geopolitics, as scholarship, will survive
only if it at once exposes and unravels new laws and tactics of
violence, and adopts contextually-derived positions against such
violence.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marcus Power and David Campbell for the
invitation to write and present an earlier version of this paper for
the conference he organized on critical geopolitics at Durham
University in September 2008. I am also indebted to Audrey
Macklin and Nick Megoran, whose work inspired several sections of
this paper. Alison Mountz, Lisa Bhungalia, and anonymous
reviewers also offered comments and insights on earlier drafts of
this paper for which I am most grateful. All errors remain my own.
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